Kickstarter Site Hacked Wednesday Night; Customer Data Compromised

If you have a Kickstarter account, you most likely received an email earlier today informing you of a security breach. According to the email, law enforcement officials contacted Kickstarter Wednesday night, alerting the company that hackers "had sought and gained unauthorized access to some of [its] customers' data." Kickstarter says that no credit card data of any kind was accessed by the hackers, but several pieces of customer information were compromised, including "usernames, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords."

While actual passwords were not revealed, since it's always possible to crack encryption, Kickstarter is advising all members to change their Kickstarter account password, along with any other accounts that may use that same password. As of the time of this writing, there are 5,633,641 total backers on Kickstarter, but it's quite possible that the actual user number is higher since you can create an account without backing a project. Nevertheless, it's unclear just how many customers were affected. The email I received says, "There is no evidence of unauthorized activity of any kind on your account," which could mean my data wasn't accessed, or maybe it just means there was no fake pledging detected. Either way, I changed my password, and I advise you to do the same.